Mar 18, 2007 
Britt Hume of Faux Noise told his viewers that Valerie Plame Wilson lied under oath; Faiz at Think Progress debunks; see also John Amato. Of course, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. Next week this talking point will spill over into MSNBC, CNN, and various print media, carried by the usual rightie stooges. Watch especially for Ed Rogers and Kate O’Beirne to show up on Hardball to make this noise. I further predict Chris Matthews will not challenge whatever they say. And it wouldn’t matter much if he did; the True Believers will accept whatever lie the Right cooks up about the Wilsons without question, and no amount of facts will change their minds.
Friday I caught a little bit of a CSPAN program in which Brian Lamb took calls discussing the recent “confessions” of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Several callers declared that the confession proved that “torture works,” thereby displaying the critical thinking skills of moth larvae. Some of the callers clearly had no idea who KSM was and were under the impression he was someone the FBI nabbed inside the U.S. recently. One caller demanded to know how “these people” are getting into the U.S.; Brian Lamb helpfully explained that the CIA probably had flown him to Guantanamo from wherever he was before on a plane.
This morning I wrote about Iraq war supporters who got themselves worked up over what was surely an unfounded rumor that antiwar protesters planned to deface the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. Today they are congratulating each other for “saving” the monument from a threat that existed only in their own overheated imaginations.
For some reason the U.S. has always had a disproportionate number of whackjobs among its citizens; that ain’t new. And the whackjobs have had political influence at various times in the past, also. What’s different is that mass media and the Internet are allowing them to live in their own self-made Crazy World on a mass scale. And the Republicans are heavily invested in keeping them crazy.
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